Choir & Organ is the leading independent magazine for all professionals and amateurs in the choral and organ worlds – whether you are an organist, choral director or singer, organ builder, keen listener, or work in publishing or the record industry, Choir & Organ is a must-read wherever you live and work.

Every two months our expert contributors bring you beautifully illustrated features on newly built and restored organs, insights into the lives and views of leading organists, choral directors and composers, profiles of pioneering and well-established choirs, and topical coverage of new research, festivals and exhibitions. In keeping with our commitment to music at the cutting edge, we commission a new work from a young composer in every issue, making the score freely available for download and performance.

Our international news and previews, with breaking stories, key awards and forthcoming premieres, combine with reviews of the latest CDs, DVDs and sheet music, and listings of recitals, festivals and courses, to keep you up to date with events and developments around the world.

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Gove U-turn on EBacc

7 February 2013

Education Secretary Michael Gove has abandoned his plans to replace
GCSEs with a new English Baccalaureate in 2015.

This major U-turn is a result of opposition to his plans by
MPs across the political spectrum, including deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, as
well the exams regulator Ofqual. Apart from running the risk of falling short
on EU regulations, the EBacc proposals drew strong criticism for encompassing English,
maths, science, languages and history or geography while completely ignoring
all the arts and other subjects, which would have been perceived as ‘second-class’.

Mr Gove nevertheless intends to restructure GCSEs, to reduce
the amount of course-work that contribute to the overall grades.

Composer Felix Mendelssohn commemorated with English Heritage plaque

6 February 2013

Dmitry Sitkovetsky unveils Mendelssohn commemoration

The regular London visits of Felix Mendelssohn - composer of
the oratorios Elijah, St Paul and Die erste Walpurgisnacht,
as well as a significant body of organ music - have been commemorated with the
installation of a 'Blue Plaque', at the behest of conservation and historic
buildings organisation English Heritage.The plaque was officially unveiled on 4 February by
violinist/conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky and is attached to 4 Hobart Place, a
Grade II listed building near Buckingham Palace in the City of Westminster.The house is the former home of the Hanoverian embassy
secretary, Karl Klingemann. Mendelssohn was at the height of his fame during a
series of visits to Britain, stayed four months in total over five
separate periods.During his stays in Hobart Place he conducted the
Philharmonic Society on numerous occasions and gave many organ recitals. It was
from this building he left to dine with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which he did
not enjoy, and Charles Dickens, which he very much did. It was back to this
address that he rushed back to give his account of his audience with Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert in 1842.At his death in 1847 Mendelssohn was widely regarded as
Europe’s greatest composer, with one biographer suggesting he was the first
composer to be internationally mourned. An obituary in The Times asserted
that he 'loved England as heartily as his own home'; memorial concerts were
held across the country and a Mendelssohn scholarship was endowed in London the
following year.Sir Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican
Centre, former BBC Proms director and member of the blue plaque panel, said a
key factor in Mendelssohn being widely accepted in the UK was largely down to
its enduring choral tradition. 'It was a major factor in the 19th Century,
which enabled him to have his works done well here, and as we know they then
became accepted into the warp and weft of the English choral tradition in a
very major way; Elijah absolutely stood at the centre of that.'Mendelssohn loved London and his links to the city were
strong. Writing about the city he said that there was 'no question that that
smoky nest is my preferred city and will remain so. I feel quite emotional when
I think of it.'A plaque was first mooted over a century ago; the case was
only recently revived at the suggestion of an English Heritage historian who
works on the Blue Plaques scheme. Asked why it had taken over a century for
Mendelssohn to be honoured, Sir Nicholas explained that, 'The people at that
time who owned the building didn't want a blue plaque on it and the file simply
mouldered away until Howard Spencer had a new discussion about it and revived
the idea.'In the year 2016, English Heritage will celebrate 150 years
of commemorative plaques, in spite of swingeing cuts in its funding. 'Because
there is a huge backlog of nominations for the scheme, there won't be any new
nominations for the next couple of years, but plaques will continue to go up,'
Sir Nicholas added.Graeme Kay

Winning hands

30 January 2013

Toby Young, Kerry Andrew and Stef Conner have won the Incorporated
Society of Musicians’ (ISM) inaugural competition for young composers with
original works for voices inspired by the music of Benjamin Britten to
celebrate the composer’s centenary this year.

Toby Young’s Missa
Brevis won the children’s voices category, with Kerry Andrew’s All Things Are
Quite and Stef Conner’s O Earendel (Hymn to the Star) – both
for SATB – being highly commended. Suzi Digby will conduct the premieres of the
three pieces at the ISM Conference at Queens’ College, Cambridge on 4 April 2013.

Toby Young studied composition with Robin Holloway at
Cambridge while a choral scholar in the King's College Chapel Choir. Kerry Andrew – a former
Choir & Organ New Music composer – specialises in experimental vocal music,
choral music and music-theatre, and won a British Composer Award in 2010. Stef Conner has a Ph.D in
composition from the University of York, and her awards include the Royal
Philharmonic Society Composition Prize.

ROYAL SEAL OF APPROVAL

30 January 2013

HM The
Queen has awarded a prestigious Regius Professorship to the music department of
Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL).

The announcement was made by the Government, and recognises the exceptionally
high quality of research and teaching in the RHUL music department. A Regius
Professorship is a rare privilege and only two have been created in the past
century.

The Queen will bestow the awards to mark her Diamond Jubilee. Professor Julian
Johnson, Head of the RHUL music department, said: ‘It is a great honour to have
the title of Regius Professor bestowed upon the department and wonderful to
hear that the quality of our teaching and research has been recognised in this
way.

‘We know that our students rate our teaching very highly and indeed our
research placed us as the top Music Department in the UK in the last Research
Assessment Exercise. It means a great deal to receive such a mark of public
esteem.’

Vicar blasts ‘cringeworthy’ beatbox machines

30 January 2013

Dr Giles FraserBBC

Dr Giles Fraser, former canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and
now vicar of St Mary's, Newington,
has condemned karaoke-style recorded music devices in churches as ‘cringeworthy
beatbox machines with no gravitas.’

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, along
with Westminster Abbey sub-organist Robert Quinney, Dr Fraser said, ‘In the
liturgy, a musician sitting at an organ needs to react sensitively to what's
going on; a machine can’t do that and you can hear how inappropriate a
machine's intervention is when it gets it wrong.’

Asked by presenter Jim Naughtie how else churches might
replace superannuated organists with no obvious successors to hand, Dr Fraser
responded that as Christianity predated the invenation of the organ there were
and still are other ways of making music in church – plainsong and taizé
chanting, for example – without resorting to machines. ‘If you wouldn’t have it
at your funeral, you shouldn’t have it in church on a Sunday morning.’

Robert Quinney added, ‘Anything that sounds so transparently
fake needs to be treated with suspicion. It’s not necessarily a natural step
for a pianist to become the sort of organist who could play in a local church, but
local congregations have changed, and there is still a stock of young organists
coming through.’

‘Live’ organists are familiar enough with the perils of lack
of co-ordination with congregations – getting ‘out’. ‘A human being playing the
organ can hear what other people are doing, so accompanying a congregation
enables you to be sensitive to the speed etc,’ said Quinney.

Dr Fraser concluded that, having witnessed one organist
eating sandwiches during his sermon and another slyly improvising a
processional on the theme tune of Blackadder for a visit by a former
Bishop of Bath and Wells, he would miss their ‘fantastic’ sense of humour if
replaced by machines, and stressed the importance of organists’ contribution
to the liturgy.